Research Tools for Students and Faculty: Personal Websites

I personally use Google Sites, but there are dozens of free website interfaces that you can use to help make a brand online. It's egocentric, but necessary, to Google yourself and figure out what people are seeing about you in online spaces. Privacy no longer applies in job applications, college admissions, internship interviews, and the like, if it is out there online, it will be found by employers, supervisors, and advisors. One way to combat the inclusiveness of online information is to increase the traffic to sites that you own, which will then appear higher on a Google search list. Owning your own domain can be powerful, but even free sites will give you a better presence online than none at all.

Domain names can be purchased at multiple hosting sites such as GoDaddy with renewable contracts for the licensing. For example, I just looked up EmmaFrancesBloomfield.com which is an available domain name for $17 for two years. These prices are truly irresistible to think that for less than a dinner out, you can have your own, personalized website for a few years. And if making your own site is daunting, you can use free site builders such as Google Sites and uCoz, but link it to your paid domain name. This provides you the professional touch of the domain name (most free sites use their company name in the site address: https://sites.google.com/site/efbloomfield/), but the ease of free site building.

My free website on Google Sites is simple, but accessible. Especially for graduate students who do not have as many interactive needs as faculty members, the free software is a great start to a website. uCoz has more interactive capabilities, but first I will discuss the positives of Google Sites:

• Multiple pages within a website make creating different categories for information easy
• File Cabinet web interface to create a page of file uploads and links (e.g., add a Dropbox link to CV, photos from a conference, links to article abstracts, etc).
• Announcements page can be subscribed to by RSS to keep people updated on important news
• Pre-made and easily customized templates from fun and quirky to sleek and professional
• Easily link to other websites to increase traffic between branded sites

If you're looking for more interactive website, uCoz has interfaces for blogs, photo galleries, professional templates, and thousands of "gadgets" to attach to the page. uCoz also allows for editing in the designs if you have the capability to write script for the page. The layout is more complicated than Google Sites, but that is part of the appeal. The additional layers of information and tweaking create much more nuanced and personalized web pages that Google Sites can, but you have to be willing to put in the time.

There are many other site builders out there, Yola, Lifeyo, Cif2, Jimdo, Webs, Wix, and Weebly, so I would suggest taking the time to compare, this is your brand, after all. Your website is someone's first impression of you. Don't you want your best foot forward? Channel Goffman, present yourself in the best light, and have your information, that you control, be found.

Research Tools for Students and Faculty: Google Citation

Once in graduate school and during the tenure process, academics are concerned with one thing: branding. Creating one's own website (site comparison forthcoming), formatting and meticulously combing one's CV, and  constructing an online presence are all important parts of one's academic brand and profile. In order to facilitate  one's online identity as a scholar, I'm going to take this post to explain two important ways to ensure that your academic publications and profile are the top results for your name.

Google Citation is an off-shoot of Google Scholar that creates profiles for academics by linking their publications within the scholar database. When someone searches Google Scholar to look for a publication or a topic area and finds an article of interest, they can select the author and be linked to their profile. Within this profile is the author's other articles in the Scholar database, the number of articles that have cited each article over the years, and links to those articles. Becoming familiar with Google Citations helps a scholar in two ways: creating a branding opportunity and tracking one's citations and web of scholarly interaction.

Google Scholar often auto-creates profiles for the more prolific authors by finding similarly cited names and linking the articles together. For new scholars and academics however, we can do part of the work for Google by creating our own profiles and linking our own publications there. The benefits to this (instead of letting Google create own for you) is that your profile will be available for searches and attached to your articles sooner and will be completed with more information. Scholars can upload their own profile photograph, create a verified email address for contact, key areas of research interests, links to other sites (like a research blog or professional website), and manually add articles that Google Citation might not have added (due to differences in citation style or name changes).

Keeping track of one's citations is a great way to create connections with other scholars with shared citations and cited each other's articles. With the multitude of journals and publications across field lines, scholars are often not aware of the people citing their articles or similar or tangential work in the same line of inquiry. This is great way to contact other scholars for panels at conferences, to find colleagues at institutions that might be hiring, or to find co-authors.

These benefits can be doubled if one has multiple citation sites. Other databases similar to Google Scholar have their own author profiles. Consider making one at each of the more popular search engines to make sure that your work is being connected to your brand. Other notable citation sites are ResearcherID at Web of Science and Scopus.

Keeping track of all of these sites is one more task on the ever-growing list of to-dos for academics, but this is an important one. Being able to link all of one's publications increases the likelihood of being found by other scholars and overall creates a stronger brand for the graduate student and faculty academic.

Research Tools for Students and Faculty: Boomerang

I was only recently introduced to Boomerang for Gmail, but it has already proven extremely useful for balancing the necessity of being prompt on emails and the rest of my graduate study. This extension for Gmail allows you to write emails and schedule them to be delivered at a later date and time in the future. The benefits and variety of uses are endless for this simple email tool, which I will list below. In addition, messages that are emailed to you can be "boomeranged" back to the top of your inbox at a later date, so it appears as a higher priority at a time that you are available to address it.

Uses as a student/faculty member:

• work late into the night but schedule messages for the next morning
• remain professional with your time stamps
• have the email be at the top of their inbox in the morning without sending it then
• schedule emails when you know people will be available
• if a professor has office hours, schedule an email to remind them the morning of that you will be stopping by
• if a professor/student only comes to campus on certain days, have an email sent on that day when you know they will be checking their work email
• stay ahead on your to-do list
• there may be a time sensitive email with a deadline (teaching assistant preferences, request for clearance to take classes, coordinating study groups, etc) that you know well in advance but it is not appropriate to be too early, so scheduling it for later (even months in the future) can take it off your plate well ahead of time
• let your email be your to-do list by scheduling emails to yourself to remember to print articles, look something up before class, or ask a question of a professor when you know you'll have some free time in your day
• be proactive and persistent for getting responses
• selecting "boomerang if I don't here back" emails allows you to be reminded of unanswered questions without doing math or remembering yourself if it has been long enough to re-send an email

My list is not by any means inclusive and if you have found any more uses, please feel free to comment! Boomerang has already been a great help to me in my graduate work and I hope that others find it useful as well!